“What in the hell is going on?”
He steps forward and captures my face in his hands. “We didn’t mean it. You have to know that.”
I shrink away from his touch, and he curses.
“I don’t know anything.”
“You know a lot more than you think you do. But the first thing you need to know was that it was a knee-jerk decision to bring you in the day we met, but I just fucking couldn’t… God, the moment I laid eyes on you—”
He leans in and I turn my head. “Why am I the secret?”
He expels a breath. His obvious hesitation has me bracing myself against the door.
“We didn’t mean it, Cecelia.”
“Just tell me why you brought me in here.”
“Okay.” He nods solemnly. “Okay. Years ago, when Horner Technologies was mainly a chemical plant, two immigrants from France, a husband and wife, died in a fire in one of the testing labs.” He holds my stare as the implication of what he’s saying dawns on me. I gape at him, tears threatening when I realize who those immigrants were.
“Dominic’s parents?”
He nods.
“They’d fled from France in an attempt to escape her ex-husband, and because they were so desperate, they accepted an invitation from an estranged relative to start a new life here.”
“Delphine.”
He nods and continues. “So they came here, to this town, to work in this plant thinking they would be safer, that here they would thrive, start living the American dream and all that entailed. Instead, they were exploited by this company and its owner because of their social disadvantage and eventually perished in a fire no one is sure was accidental. We still haven’t pieced together exactly what happened, but it was fucked up and reeked of foul play from the way it was handled afterward. Your father covered it up, swept it under the rug. He did the bare minimum for Dominic and offered nothing but a formal letterhead addressed apology included in the settlement summary. A slap in the face after the fact, especially with the CEO being a local. The local news didn’t even cover it, Cecelia. There was nothing in the papers, either.”
“But why?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Delphine was outraged, but she was young, and at the time too afraid to go head to head with Roman. Something happened that night, and he buried it. And we’re determined to find out what.”
This rattles me to my core. “You’re saying my dad may have covered up a murder, two murders, here, at this plant?”
“Not sure, but Dom’s parents weren’t the first to ever question your father’s business practices. Your father has been pulling a lot of shit for a very, very long time and getting away with it.”
“So, you’re spying on him? Working here to find out the truth?”
“More than that,” Sean says warily. He gives me a telling stare, and I try to read between the lines.
“You’re going to hurt him?”
“We’re going to make him suffer. For everything he’s done and everything he took from Dom, and from every other family who’s worked for him since he opened this fucking plant. That’s why you need to stay away from us. You can’t be implicated in anything that goes down. It’s not safe.”
“What are you going to do?” He reads the budding fear in my eyes.
He shakes his head. “If we wanted him dead, he would be. That’s not who we are.”
“So, what’s to stop me from going to him right now and telling him everything?”
His shoulders bulge with tension. “Nothing. But there are other players in this, with a broader reach, and they know we have you.”
“Had me.”
“That’s what we were trying to convey, but when they saw us together, when they saw…”
“Saw what?”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “That we fucked up and caught feelings, we had to end it, the way we did, to keep you out of it.”
“You’re telling me that was a performance?”
“To keep you safe. But now you’re on their radar. And I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”
“So, wait. All of this started because of my dad? He owns a fucking technology manufacturing company. He makes calculators. Shady business practices do not make him a murderer.”
“He owns more than that. He owns Triple Falls and everyone in it, including the police. He’s run a monopoly on this city, and no one is willing to let him have it. Not anymore.”